Wall Street is betting on Ukraine’s drone technology

March 18, 2026 / 2:19 PM EDT / CBS News

A Ukrainian drone technology startup saw the most explosive U.S. stock market debut in the last year during its first day trading on Nasdaq. Shares in Swarmer, whose software enables single pilots to control hundreds of drones at once, soared over 700% before closing at $31 on Tuesday.

The company, based in Austin, Texas, but founded in Ukraine, has been used widely by the Ukrainian military since 2024. Erik Prince, the founder of the U.S. private military contractor Blackwater, joined Swarmer as non-executive chairman last month.

Experts say Swarmer is likely to be the first of many: a Ukrainian defense startup with an American face that leans on U.S. capital to scale production for both the Ukrainian and American militaries.

Ukrainian startups and American investors make a natural pairing. Four years of wartime innovation has made Ukraine a world leader in mass-producing cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones and the technology used in and around them.

In a letter to prospective shareholders, Prince noted that Swarmer’s value is rooted in the depth of operational data it has gathered from Ukraine’s battlefield.

“Swarmer’s platform has been deployed in Ukraine with more than 100,000 real-world missions in active combat environments, informing the software and machine-learning models that feed into it,” Prince wrote. “This cycle — deploy, observe, adapt and improve — creates a compounding advantage that cannot be replicated in laboratories or simulations.”

But Ukrainian companies have often lacked the financing needed to expand their operations. Stringent controls on exporting Ukrainian defense technology abroad have limited access to capital, leaving companies to produce at fractions of their total capacity. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, Ukraine’s defense industry reached a production capacity of $35 billion in 2025 but received only $6.1 billion in foreign funding.

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Incorporating businesses in the U.S. and bringing in partners with ties to America’s defense industry could offer solutions. Last fall, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined the board of the Ukrainian drone and missile manufacturer Fire Point. This week, a representative from Powerus, an American drone manufacturer backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., told CBS News that the company will pursue joint ventures with Ukrainian companies once Kyiv’s export restrictions allow it.

The Pentagon, for its part, has made clear that it is interested in Ukraine’s comparatively cheap drone technology to complement America’s more expensive arsenal. Last week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine would be sending drone defense experts to the Middle East amid reports that American military bases were relying on expensive missile interceptors to take down cheaper Iranian drones.

In February, the U.S. invited 25 drone manufacturers, including two Ukrainian companies, to compete on a course at Fort Benning, in Georgia, as part of the Pentagon’s “Drone Dominance” program. On March 7, Ukrainian company Sky Fall’s drones won the competition, setting it up to receive Pentagon contracts.

Prince is betting on investors seeing the same upside in Swarmer as attention to Ukraine’s battle-tested, cost-effective defense technology grows.

“The Department of War has been asleep for dozens of years and allowed a very cartel-like defence industry to sell massively overpriced stuff,” he told Fox Business in an interview Tuesday. “I am excited to be a part of Swarmer because it is proven combat technology developed truly on the edge of battle.”